With the advance of portable technologies, down-sampling of high resolution image information is often required to display high resolution images(s) and/or video(s), e.g., high-definition (HD) television (HDTV) information, HD movies, etc. on a lower resolution display, e.g., included in a handheld device such as a cellular phones, a portable multimedia player (PMP), a personal data assistant (PDA), etc.
A color pixel of a high resolution matrix display, e.g. liquid crystal display (LCD), plasma display panel (PDP), etc. includes three subpixels, each subpixel representing one of three primary colors, i.e., red (R), green (G), and blue (B). Although the subpixels are not separately visible, they are perceived together as color(s). One conventional technique for down-sampling a high resolution, e.g., color, image is pixel-based down-sampling, which selects every third pixel of the high resolution image to display. Such down-sampling severely affects shapes and/or details of the image, as over 30% of information of the image is compressed (or lost). Further, pixel-based down-sampling causes aliasing, or distortion, of the image near shape edges.
Another conventional technique for down-sampling a high resolution image is subpixel-based down-sampling, which alternately selects red, green, and blue subpixels from consecutive pixels of a block of pixels of the high resolution image in a horizontal direction. As such, the (i,j) pixel in the downsampled image includes subpixels (Ri,j, Gi,j+1, Bi,j+2) of the block of pixels—the subscripts denoting pixel indices of the block of pixels. Although such subpixel-based down-sampling preserves the shapes of images more effectively than pixel-based down-sampling, resulting subpixel-based images incur more color fringing, i.e., artifacts, around non-horizontal edges than pixel-based downsampled images.
The above-described deficiencies of today's image down-sampling techniques and related technologies are merely intended to provide an overview of some of the problems of conventional technology, and are not intended to be exhaustive. Other problems with the state of the art, and corresponding benefits of some of the various non-limiting embodiments described herein, may become further apparent upon review of the following detailed description.